When is the last time you saw Richard Matheson, Fritz Leiber,Robert Heinlein, Jack Vance, A.E. van Vogt, Theodore Sturgeon,Harlan Ellison, Poul Anderson or Frank Herbert mentioned in anylist of significant West Coast authors? Even science fiction writerswho 'crossed over' into respectability, such as Philip K. Dick,Ursula K. Le Guin and Ray Bradbury rarely get included in readinglists of dream coast fiction. Yet here was an area in which theWest not only matched the East in impact and acclaim, butlegitimately surpassed it. During the glory days of sciencefiction and fantasy, the trends were set out West; meanwhileManhattan, Boston and all of Europe needed to play catch-up asbest they could.

Of these authors, Jack Vance had thedeepest California roots. His grandfatherarrived in California a decade before theGold Rush, at a time when San Francisco'spopulation amounted to only a few hundredpioneers. After his childhood in San Francisco,Vance moved with his mother to a ranch nearthe confluence of the Sacramento and SanJoaquin rivers, and he later matriculated atUC Berkeley. Here he wrote his first sciencefiction story for an English class—and wasderided for doing so by the professor. Underslightly different circumstances, he might haveflourished as one of the bohemian literary figuresof beatnik San Francisco, but he had populist tasteswhich led him to pursue opportunities as a scriptwriter for theentertainment industry—his first big break came via a job atTwentieth Century Fox—and as an author of genre fiction forpulp magazines.

Vance may have made his name with the pulps, but his writingstyle and knack for close observation of nuanced humandramas were more aligned with the fiction of the slick, coatedweeklies that published 'serious' authors. He is one of thegreat anthropologists of science fiction, able to create entirealternative worlds so plausible and persuasive that readers hardlyneed futuristic concepts or advanced technologies to hold theirinterest. Even the most mundane matters of everyday life, aspresented in his fiction, captivate us with their resonance andevocative detail. The master of this style of science fiction wasFrank Herbert, whose Dune universe set the standard formeticulous outer space ethnographies, and I am hardly surprisedto learn that Vance and Herbert were very close friends, took jointfamily vacations and even shared a houseboat, built with the helpof fellow author Poul Anderson.

These virtues of discernment are demonstrated again and againin Vance’s masterful 1969 novel Emphyrio. Most genre writersintroduce heinous crimes or outlandish technologies in theiropening chapters, but Vance takes a different approach. Helovingly sketches scenes of family life in an artisan-drivencommunity where the economy is supported by elaboratehandwork—the production of furniture, jewelry and othereveryday items of use and apparel. The story is set on adistant planet, and in time we are introduced to spaceshipsand peculiar alien creatures, but Vance has drawn us deeplyinto his narrative long before these take center stage. Muchlike the characters who populate Emphyrio, Vance takes pridein the craftsmanship and well-wrought details of his trade. Thisis the "kernel of Vance’s genius," sci-fi historian Adam Robertsrightly explains: "his carefully mannered prose slips effortlesslyfrom familiar to alien, treating both with the same disinterestedprecision."

In Ambroy on the planet Halma, a youngster named GhylTarvoke watches on helplessly while his father Amiante getsinto trouble with his guild and the local political authorities.Amiante is hardly a rabble-rouser, but even his small gesturesof support for a more open, democratic society meet with harshreprisals from the entrenched oligarchies that control thecommunity's wealth and power. Ghyl gets caught up in thissame battle, inspired both by his father’s courage and ancientlegend about a young man named Emphyrio who, hundreds ofyears earlier, had led a rebellion against enemies of the people.

This basic plot, as outlined here, will not be unfamiliar to readersof science fiction. A hardy libertarian streak is now embedded insci-fi literature, and seems to crop up irrespective of the authors'own political leanings —when was the last time you read a sciencefiction story that championed the government against the rightsof the individual? Do such genre stories actually exist? Readers ofthese tales apparently don’t want to hear about the beneficentvisions of the central planning agencies; instead they get jazzedabout brave individuals who take on the system, the renegadeswho refuse to play by the rules and fight for freedom at all costs.

Yet even if you have read this kind of story many times before,Vance will surprise you with his different spin on the conflictbetween individual and state. The world of Emphyrio is not adystopia, but rather a smoothly-functioning bureaucracy in whichmost people pursue happy, productive lives. The 'oppressive' taximposed by the Lords on the workers is so tiny—a mere 1.18%of their earnings—that it’s almost a joke to consider it as alegitimate cause of rebellion. Even the most restrictive law onthe books, a prohibition of mass manufacturing and massduplication, can be plausibly justified given the local economy'sdependence on the local artisans’ reputation for uniquehandcrafted work. What could be wrong about a society thattakes pride in its homegrown artists and adopts legitimatemeasures to protect their jobs?

In other words, Jack Vance will not give readers the simplisticgood-guys-versus-bad-guys conflict that almost every othersci-fi writer employed, almost unthinkingly, in most of theirstories. Eventually Vance delivers weapons and violence intoEmphyrio, but even here they are employed in ethicallycomplex situations. Our hero Ghyl Tarvoke finds, to his dismay,that occasionally he needs to take the side of his enemies inorder to counter his more ruthless colleagues. And, as in real life,making the right moral decision sometimes leads to victory andpersonal rewards, but just as often can lead to ingratitude, reprisalsand even death.

Tarvoke’s disreputable friends convince him to join theirscheme of hijacking a spaceship. But he finds, too late, thatthey lack his idealism and moral restraint, and ends upabandoned on a remote planet along the noble family whohad owned the craft. He helps them survive the dangers oftheir new environment and guides them back to civilization, butthey still want him arrested for piracy, and he is forced to fleeto avoid punishment. He returns to his home planet, but now indisguise, and with a plan to disrupt an economic system that,he believes, exploits the local artisans. But back on Halma, heis a wanted criminal, and he can only pursue his plans forliberation and revenge at great personal risk.

Here again, Vance takes one of the most overworked basic plots—a banished rebel returns home to take on the evil leader—and infuses it with new life. Here the hero’s revenge requiresno bloodshed, but is exacted through canny manipulation ofbureaucracy and economic institutions. You could hardly imaginea less promising sphere of conflict for an adventure story, butVance is brilliant in his plotting and convincing in his step-by-step unfolding of Ghyl’s one-man campaign to reconfigure thesociety of his native land. Saving the best for last, Vance,delivers an unexpected plot twist in the final pages, both pushingthe story forward to an unexpected resolution and building onthe symbolic connection with the legend of the hero Emphyriothat undergirds the entire novel.

Why isn't this stellar novel, or its author better known? I canonly speculate, but I fear that Vance may have been too muchof a perfectionist for genre fiction, taking care in nuances lost tomuch of the pulp audience, yet limited by the divided literaryculture of his time that scorned writers who set their stories, nomatter how smartly realized, in outer space. In the current day,when that ugly Berlin Wall between genre and literary fiction isfinally crumbling (alas, too much of it is still standing), an authorsuch as Jack Vance would enjoy more freedom to work in thefertile ground between these two models of narrative fiction. Alas,he is not around to benefit from this pleasing détente, but we canstill give him his due. A good start might be to revisit our modelsof literary history, and put Vance and his cadre of West Coastgenre masters, back into our cultural pantheons and recommendedreading lists.

Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and popular culture. His next book, ahistory of love songs, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.